Sunday, March 26, 2006
WHAT'S THE WORD-A-GOD FER?
PROLOGUE TO A "READING THE BIBLE ARIGHT" SERIES
I have been thinking a lot lately about how to interpret the Bible, and in what ways is it inspired, and in what ways is it not. While reading a book called "The Remaking of Evangelical Theology" (see here), I had a huge surprise. This is going to take some setting up, though.
HISTORY LESSON
The book chronicles the rise of the Christian Fundamentalist movement, and then the rise and current course of the Evangelical movement. I described some of the history involved here, in a post called About "Separation" and Christian Bubbles. In a nutshell, the "Fundamentalists" were the defenders of the faith versus the liberal "Modernists" who were taking over denominations and schools around the first 40 years of the 20th century. The Fundamentalists ended up losing the battle. BIG TIME. They became very mean spirited and condemned everybody who didn't believe everything that they did. Later, a group of former Fundamentalists came along, who tried to engage the culture again, instead of hiding in Fundamentalist schools that had been formed when the liberals kicked them out of all the existing ones. This group was called the Evangelicals, and included Billy Graham and Fuller Seminary. And they were condemned by the Fundamentalists as well.
THE FUNDAMENTALIST'S PROOF FOR THE GOSPEL
A mild shock came over what all the battles were about: the inerrancy of Scripture. This was basically the WHOLE issue. Not whether miracles were real, whether God existed, whether Jesus rose from the dead, whether drums belong in church . It was over whether or not every word and idea in the Bible was without error.
The REAL shock came in finding out WHY "inerrancy" was THE CRUCIAL ISSUE:
Because the Fundamentalists said that if the Bible was NOT completely infallible, then Christianity falls to the ground.
Stop and think a moment. I was always under the impression that this was a liberal accusation: "Since I can find errors in the Bible, I don't believe that it's true when it says that Jesus rose from the dead." Therefore, the Fundamentalists (rightly) tried to defend the Bible, showing how it is inspired by God, and how many "contradictions" disappear when it is interpreted correctly. That's one of the reasons I was writing about how to interpret the Bible.
But I was WRONG. Liberals had never really made this charge very often yet. Fundamentalists like J. Gresham Machen asserted the infallibility of Scripture as THE PROOF that the gospel was true. And it was the same Fundamentalists who asserted that if the Bible is not infallible in EVERY thing it says, whether about God, Jesus, astronomy, biology, botany, or history, then Christianity was FALSE. Hence, the doctrine of inerrancy became THE test of whether or not you were faithful or not. Depart one inch from full inerrancy, and you were called LIBERAL and condemned.
Some Christians at the time saw this as suicide. "Wait, you're telling people that if they look at the Bible and see errors in it, then they should not believe anything it says?! Are you nuts?" And indeed, the Bible has lost much of its prestige in the culture since that time. All it took was for someone to point out that Jesus was not technically right when he asserted that "the mustard seed is the smallest of seeds," and then they would reject the Bible. Or some other such "mistake," whether real or imagined.
THE CLASSICAL PROTESTANT POSITION
However, the book I am reading asserts that this was not the historic Protestant position, though I haven't checked his sources yet to confirm this. He claims that such stalwarts of faith from Martin Luther to John Calvin to John Wesley did not believe in inerrancy that way. Instead, they all pointed to 2 Timothy 3:16-
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Those rejecting Fundamentalist Innerancy would say that the Bible itself says that it is useful for training in "righteousness," not in biology or astronomy.
A funny example mentioned in the book concerns Calvin, who said that the Bible uses the ideas that people of the time the books were written would have believed. He claims that the Bible says that the moon is bigger than Saturn, which is clearly wrong, but that it does not affect faith because the bible is not meant to teach astronomy. (Well, I thought it was funny, because I have no clue what verse he's referring to!)
In this view, the inspiration of the Bible instead pertains to what we should believe about God, Jesus, the Spirit, sin, atonement and salvation. Wesley supposedly makes a similar comment in regards to botany, probably referring to the mustard seed verses. Obviously, these ideas would also apply to how a Christian interprets Genesis 1 and then responds to evolutionary theory. Darwin may indeed be in need of debunking, but perhaps not by asserting that "God made all the creatures during the six days of creation, and none of them evolved from any other." In other words, the Bible gives us a Theology of Creation, but it may not give us the details of how God did it.
On a side note, the Fundamentalists came up with terms for these positions. They call their position "Unlimited Inerrancy," and the older position "Limited Inerrancy." They chose those terms because "limited" sounds like less faithful.
FINDING WHERE I FIT?
It seems that the rules on interpreting the Bible that I have learned point to what the Fundamentalists would call "Limited Inerrency", since I put the biblical author's intention above everything else. As Gordon Fee pointed out, if the author was inspired by the Holy Spirit, then the author's intention behind what he wrote will also be God's intention for that part of the Bible. So, our first question is always, "What seems to be the author's intention in writing this passage?" For example, looking at Genesis 1, if it seems that it was Moses' intention to accurately describe the details of creation, then teaching about biology and geology would be part of the Bible's intention here. ("God created the world in 6 days of 24 hours each, and we should burn Darwin's books!") However, if Moses' intention seems to be to show how God's Hand was guiding everything from Day 1, and he is expressing that in a poetic way that is not meant to be taken as a strict scientific account, then teaching the details biology and geology were NOT God's intention here.
However, I am leaning towards the classical Protestant position, for a few reasons. First, the Bible does not say it is infallible. It just says it is good for training in righteousness. Second, the Bible does not point to itself as the proof of the gospel. The gospel itself was always asserting itself upon people who heard it preached. (That's a simpler way of saying what theologians mean when they say that the Bible is "self-authenticating."). Romans 1:16 says, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes."
THEN VERSUS NOW
In the gospels and Acts, the miracles of Jesus, and his followers were proof that the Kingdom of God had come. 1)People were to see the miracles, and then extend their belief to what they had not seen: the resurrection of Jesus. 2)They would have the ability to do this as they heard the gospel preached, which came with the divine convicting power of the Spirit. 3)Once believing, they would have the experiential confirming presence of the Holy Spirit as proof that they had entered the Kingdom of God. This pattern did not always happen this way exactly, but it's a pretty good summary of how things went. Nowhere is there mention of believing that the Bible is infallible.
But it's pretty obvious to see why Christians would retreat to the position that inerrancy was the key. 1) Nobody believed anymore that the gospel should be preached along with demonstrations of the Spirit's power (ie. miracles of healing and deliverance). That was just for the "apostlic age." 2) And nobody believed that the Spirit provided a confirmation after believing, except the Pentecostals (and they thought it could only be tongues, of course, which was close to the biblical pattern but not exact) and their forefathers in the Wesleyan/Holiness groups (Wesley's "witness of the Spirit" also hit on some of the biblical idea, but not completely). Of course, both of these groups were considered theologically beneath the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, so here was another experiential proof of the gospel lost. 3) The only thing remaining was the Spirit's convicting power shown whenever the gospel itself was preached, and that was certainly seen in the evangelistic campaigns of D.L. Moody and Billy Graham. But even here, as many Christians did not even know how to communicate the gospel to their neighbors in words that were current and relevant, the thought of relying on this may have seemed hopeless.
But to construct a philosophical/theological system that rested everything on the truthfullness of the Bible? That seemed doable! Isn't that why we send our brightest believers to seminary and teach them as much philosophy and logic as their brains can handle? We can proove the gospel that way, and we'll never have to answer any messy questions like why didn't somebody get healed. And no one will ridicule us by calling us "holy rollers."
Whatever I believe about inerrancy, I cannot agree that the Christian faith stands or falls on how infallible the Bible is. The apostle Paul asserted that there was actually a thing that would cause Christianity to fall apart: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). The resurrection of the Son of God is what Christianity stands or falls on, not competing views of the Bible.
I have been thinking a lot lately about how to interpret the Bible, and in what ways is it inspired, and in what ways is it not. While reading a book called "The Remaking of Evangelical Theology" (see here), I had a huge surprise. This is going to take some setting up, though.
HISTORY LESSON
The book chronicles the rise of the Christian Fundamentalist movement, and then the rise and current course of the Evangelical movement. I described some of the history involved here, in a post called About "Separation" and Christian Bubbles. In a nutshell, the "Fundamentalists" were the defenders of the faith versus the liberal "Modernists" who were taking over denominations and schools around the first 40 years of the 20th century. The Fundamentalists ended up losing the battle. BIG TIME. They became very mean spirited and condemned everybody who didn't believe everything that they did. Later, a group of former Fundamentalists came along, who tried to engage the culture again, instead of hiding in Fundamentalist schools that had been formed when the liberals kicked them out of all the existing ones. This group was called the Evangelicals, and included Billy Graham and Fuller Seminary. And they were condemned by the Fundamentalists as well.
THE FUNDAMENTALIST'S PROOF FOR THE GOSPEL
A mild shock came over what all the battles were about: the inerrancy of Scripture. This was basically the WHOLE issue. Not whether miracles were real, whether God existed, whether Jesus rose from the dead, whether drums belong in church . It was over whether or not every word and idea in the Bible was without error.
The REAL shock came in finding out WHY "inerrancy" was THE CRUCIAL ISSUE:
Because the Fundamentalists said that if the Bible was NOT completely infallible, then Christianity falls to the ground.
Stop and think a moment. I was always under the impression that this was a liberal accusation: "Since I can find errors in the Bible, I don't believe that it's true when it says that Jesus rose from the dead." Therefore, the Fundamentalists (rightly) tried to defend the Bible, showing how it is inspired by God, and how many "contradictions" disappear when it is interpreted correctly. That's one of the reasons I was writing about how to interpret the Bible.
But I was WRONG. Liberals had never really made this charge very often yet. Fundamentalists like J. Gresham Machen asserted the infallibility of Scripture as THE PROOF that the gospel was true. And it was the same Fundamentalists who asserted that if the Bible is not infallible in EVERY thing it says, whether about God, Jesus, astronomy, biology, botany, or history, then Christianity was FALSE. Hence, the doctrine of inerrancy became THE test of whether or not you were faithful or not. Depart one inch from full inerrancy, and you were called LIBERAL and condemned.
Some Christians at the time saw this as suicide. "Wait, you're telling people that if they look at the Bible and see errors in it, then they should not believe anything it says?! Are you nuts?" And indeed, the Bible has lost much of its prestige in the culture since that time. All it took was for someone to point out that Jesus was not technically right when he asserted that "the mustard seed is the smallest of seeds," and then they would reject the Bible. Or some other such "mistake," whether real or imagined.
THE CLASSICAL PROTESTANT POSITION
However, the book I am reading asserts that this was not the historic Protestant position, though I haven't checked his sources yet to confirm this. He claims that such stalwarts of faith from Martin Luther to John Calvin to John Wesley did not believe in inerrancy that way. Instead, they all pointed to 2 Timothy 3:16-
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Those rejecting Fundamentalist Innerancy would say that the Bible itself says that it is useful for training in "righteousness," not in biology or astronomy.
A funny example mentioned in the book concerns Calvin, who said that the Bible uses the ideas that people of the time the books were written would have believed. He claims that the Bible says that the moon is bigger than Saturn, which is clearly wrong, but that it does not affect faith because the bible is not meant to teach astronomy. (Well, I thought it was funny, because I have no clue what verse he's referring to!)
In this view, the inspiration of the Bible instead pertains to what we should believe about God, Jesus, the Spirit, sin, atonement and salvation. Wesley supposedly makes a similar comment in regards to botany, probably referring to the mustard seed verses. Obviously, these ideas would also apply to how a Christian interprets Genesis 1 and then responds to evolutionary theory. Darwin may indeed be in need of debunking, but perhaps not by asserting that "God made all the creatures during the six days of creation, and none of them evolved from any other." In other words, the Bible gives us a Theology of Creation, but it may not give us the details of how God did it.
On a side note, the Fundamentalists came up with terms for these positions. They call their position "Unlimited Inerrancy," and the older position "Limited Inerrancy." They chose those terms because "limited" sounds like less faithful.
FINDING WHERE I FIT?
It seems that the rules on interpreting the Bible that I have learned point to what the Fundamentalists would call "Limited Inerrency", since I put the biblical author's intention above everything else. As Gordon Fee pointed out, if the author was inspired by the Holy Spirit, then the author's intention behind what he wrote will also be God's intention for that part of the Bible. So, our first question is always, "What seems to be the author's intention in writing this passage?" For example, looking at Genesis 1, if it seems that it was Moses' intention to accurately describe the details of creation, then teaching about biology and geology would be part of the Bible's intention here. ("God created the world in 6 days of 24 hours each, and we should burn Darwin's books!") However, if Moses' intention seems to be to show how God's Hand was guiding everything from Day 1, and he is expressing that in a poetic way that is not meant to be taken as a strict scientific account, then teaching the details biology and geology were NOT God's intention here.
However, I am leaning towards the classical Protestant position, for a few reasons. First, the Bible does not say it is infallible. It just says it is good for training in righteousness. Second, the Bible does not point to itself as the proof of the gospel. The gospel itself was always asserting itself upon people who heard it preached. (That's a simpler way of saying what theologians mean when they say that the Bible is "self-authenticating."). Romans 1:16 says, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes."
THEN VERSUS NOW
In the gospels and Acts, the miracles of Jesus, and his followers were proof that the Kingdom of God had come. 1)People were to see the miracles, and then extend their belief to what they had not seen: the resurrection of Jesus. 2)They would have the ability to do this as they heard the gospel preached, which came with the divine convicting power of the Spirit. 3)Once believing, they would have the experiential confirming presence of the Holy Spirit as proof that they had entered the Kingdom of God. This pattern did not always happen this way exactly, but it's a pretty good summary of how things went. Nowhere is there mention of believing that the Bible is infallible.
But it's pretty obvious to see why Christians would retreat to the position that inerrancy was the key. 1) Nobody believed anymore that the gospel should be preached along with demonstrations of the Spirit's power (ie. miracles of healing and deliverance). That was just for the "apostlic age." 2) And nobody believed that the Spirit provided a confirmation after believing, except the Pentecostals (and they thought it could only be tongues, of course, which was close to the biblical pattern but not exact) and their forefathers in the Wesleyan/Holiness groups (Wesley's "witness of the Spirit" also hit on some of the biblical idea, but not completely). Of course, both of these groups were considered theologically beneath the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, so here was another experiential proof of the gospel lost. 3) The only thing remaining was the Spirit's convicting power shown whenever the gospel itself was preached, and that was certainly seen in the evangelistic campaigns of D.L. Moody and Billy Graham. But even here, as many Christians did not even know how to communicate the gospel to their neighbors in words that were current and relevant, the thought of relying on this may have seemed hopeless.
But to construct a philosophical/theological system that rested everything on the truthfullness of the Bible? That seemed doable! Isn't that why we send our brightest believers to seminary and teach them as much philosophy and logic as their brains can handle? We can proove the gospel that way, and we'll never have to answer any messy questions like why didn't somebody get healed. And no one will ridicule us by calling us "holy rollers."
Whatever I believe about inerrancy, I cannot agree that the Christian faith stands or falls on how infallible the Bible is. The apostle Paul asserted that there was actually a thing that would cause Christianity to fall apart: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). The resurrection of the Son of God is what Christianity stands or falls on, not competing views of the Bible.
